04 March 2013 4:48 PM

Am I too soft on Anthony Blair?

A number of readers are asking why I am so soft on Anthony Blair. They should read the words that I used with more care . ‘I cannot feel anger at Anthony Blair over the Iraq War which he still absurdly defends. I am quite sure he never understood what he was doing. Those who created him out of nothing, and those who were willingly fooled by him, are the ones to blame.’

Surely, to say that a man who was at the time Her Majesty’s First Lord of the Treasury and Prime Minister, *did not understand what he was doing* is a far more devastating criticism than to rail that he was a ‘warmonger’ or ‘mass killer’ or ‘war criminal’ or whatever the crowd likes to say? What I am saying is that Mr Blair never really was a real prime minister, that he was a little squeaking figure , baffled by events, concealed inside a booming image of power.

I expect those who attack me for my supposed leniency are also the ones who keep asking (though I have answered it a dozen times) why I call him ‘Anthony’ instead of ‘Tony’. It is because it is his name. His own wife, Cherie Booth, described him as ‘the barrister, Anthony Blair’ in a leaflet issued by her, during her own failed campaign for a parliamentary seat in Margate in 1983. She surely ought to have known what he was called. It wasn’t as if she didn’t know that people called ‘Anthony’ are sometimes called ‘Tony’. She made a speech during that campaign, of which only fragments are recorded, about ‘the Two Tonys’ who had influenced her on her path to socialism. As it happens they were both present on the platform of the meeting – ‘Tony’ Benn and her father ‘Tony’ Booth. The ‘Anthony’ who had not apparently influenced her in that direction at all was sitting not on the dais but in the audience, a nobody, undistinguished either in the law (his chosen profession) or in politics (the career he hoped to pursue because he could see little future in the law, as he had recently explained to her over a glum birthday lunch, recounted in her memoirs).

By the way, I repeat here my standing request, which has never yet received an answer, for anyone who was ever represented in court by Mr Blair when he was a barrister, to step forward.

But he played little part in her campaign after that for, suddenly, he too was selected, at the very last moment, for the completely safe seat of Sedgefield. Unlike his fiercely left-wing wife, he had until then failed to find a seat of his own to fight, despite a reasonably competent if awkward by-election campaign in Beaconsfield, smack in the middle of the Falklands War, during which he had been teased quite a lot by the Daily Telegraph’s then sketch-writer Godfrey Barker. He had lost his deposit. He had also won the warm endorsement of the then party leader Michael Foot, an endorsement he later did little to repay, when poor old Footy became an unperson, not to be mentioned in public, let alone honoured as a former leader of his party and (like him or not) a distinguished figure of the Left.

Now, the accepted account of Mr Blair’s selection for Sedgefield doesn’t really make sense. Somehow or other this privately-educated London barrister is supposed to have beaten the formidable left-wing brawler Les Huckfield, in a left-dominated seat, either because of his not very gritty Northern connections ( he told them he had grown up on an ‘estate’ in Durham, which was technically true. It just hadn’t been a council estate) or because of a letter from Michael Foot, supposedly saying he should actually be the candidate (It didn’t. It just praised his performance in Beaconsfield), the text of which was not read out at the crucial meeting. Or perhaps it was because of his membership of CND, something he would later get the party machine to deny on his behalf. Because the Blair of 1983 was in fact a standard-issue London leftist, whatever the legends now say.

In my view, he held those positions not out of conviction but out of protective colouration. I belonged to a London Labour Party at that time, and I opposed CND, the LCC (Labour Co-Ordinating Committee) , and the CLPD (Campaign for Labour Party Democracy), and the rest of the outfits then pushing Labour towards its current Euro-Communist, Gramscian culturally revolutionary position, madly misunderstood both by Fleet Street and by Labour’s own thicker old leftists as ‘right wing’.

And as a result I was in a very small, very disliked minority in my Labour Party at both ward and constituency level. I enjoy that sort of thing. Most people don’t. Most of the Labour Party members who felt as I then did were leaving to join the Social Democratic Party (SDP) around that time.

Round about then I first met ‘the barrister, Anthony Blair’, thanks to my wife’s membership of a body called the Society of Labour Lawyers. I think our first encounter was at a gloomy dinner at the old Great Western Hotel at Paddington. Soon afterwards, to my amusement, he turned up in Parliament, round about the time I began work as a Political (lobby) reporter for my former newspaper. It was my job to take such young, new MPs out to lunch. And, as we’d met and our wives were lawyers, and as our first children had been born about the same time, we had a sort of bond. But I couldn’t be bothered to invite him out. I felt a terrible sense of boredom at the prospect. I had an overwhelming feeling that the leader and the policy of the day would all be praised and glorified. And that, if I did the same thing a year later and the leader and the policy had altered completely, they too would be praised and glorified. And – worst of all – I suspected he wouldn’t be aware of having changed.

Was I wrong? I’ve sometimes wondered. But I don’t think so. I was never going to be part of any project to revive the Labour Party’s fortunes (by then I’d left, without regret, and rather hoped that Labour would be finished for good). Even if I had been I’d have been targeted and wooed by people more knowing than A.Blair. I’ve watched him with interest ever since and I have never heard him say anything from the heart that wasn’t banal. I feel quite differently about Alastair Campbell, a heavyweight politician whose force of mind and conviction I can respect, and an opponent I can take seriously. But modern politics could never have found room for Alastair. He’d scare away the voters who buy governments the way they buy cornflakes, by looking at the pretty box. Alastair’s not pretty. But which of the two actually ran the government?

I can’t work out what Anthony’s really interested in – you might think religion, thanks to the fuss he makes about it, but in what way? This is a man who, soon before he became a Roman Catholic, told the Pope off for having the wrong opinions on war – a subject on which the Holy See tends to speak with some authority. Well, many of us have disagreements of one kind or another with the Vatican. But we don’t then go and deliberately join the RC church, do we?

He has certainly *become* interested in money and property, as all can see. But I don’t think that was his motivation at the time. Perhaps his dreadful rock band, ‘Ugly Rumours’ (I almost had to waterboard him to tell me this name, during the one flaccid, tooth-grindingly tedious interview he ever granted me, back when he was Shadow Home Secretary) gives us a clue. Perhaps, what he really wanted was to be Mick Jagger, and had to settle for being ‘Tony Blair’ instead. Oddly enough, it turned out not to be that different. The warm golden glow of celebrity, an endless stream of first-class flights , flattery and nice hotels, with all the tedious tasks of life just smoothed away, came to him in the end. Both men, interestingly , take a great deal of trouble to keep fit.

But back for a moment to Sedgefield. What if he really got the seat because various forces in the Labour establishment wanted the opposite of Michael Foot. To their fury, Foot had just survived because the Labour candidate had unexpectedly won the Darlington by-election (which almost everyone in the whole Shadow Cabinet had been hoping the party would lose. I’m reliably informed that, had Labour lost the Darlington by-election, Michael Foot would the following morning have been confronted by a deputation of Labour potentates, urging his immediate resignation to make way for Denis Healey, which would certainly have made the 1983 general election more fun than it was. Great was the fury among the plotters when Labour won Darlington.)

But if they couldn’t get rid of Foot then, what about the future? What Labour needed was a long-term secret weapon – an anti-Foot – a telegenic young man, no walking stick, no ill-advised overcoat, no floppy white hair, no alarming sheep-like cadences in his oratory, no past, no opinions worth talking about, some acting ability desirable. Get such a young man a safe seat. Talk him up in the press. Give him a chance in front bench shadow jobs. Get him on TV. Perhaps by, oh, 1995 or so, he’d be ready to allow Labour to take revenge for all the humiliations of the Thatcher years.

Who was there? Well, nobody much. Most seriously ambitious people in the political world weren’t bothering with the Labour Party just then. If it had a future, it was a very long way off. But the Labour lawyers, an influential network, had heard of young Anthony. And they could have told the trades unions, who tend to have a large say in the selection of candidates in seats such as Sedgefield, that this was a young man worth investing in. And if that had happened, then the selection of Anthony Blair at Sedgefield (transformed into ‘Tony’ for Northern consumption) would make sense, as it doesn’t otherwise.

Would Anthony ever have come to anything without such help? Once he reached the top, would he have been anything without Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson? How much did he ever know or understand of the issues of the time? My own view (supported by one or two interesting pieces of personal information) remains, not much. I just don’t think he’s very interested in politics, much as I am not very interested in sport, But whereas you can’t succeed in sport unless you’re good at it, you can succeed in *modern* politics without being good at it, in fact, precisely because you’re not good at it, but are instead good at the tricks of marketing and presentation that so many voters seem only too willing to be seduced by.

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Please Peter Hitchens comment on Northern Ireland and what is shamefully going on here at present. Democracy is being and has been turned on its head. You seem to be the only commentator on Northern Ireland who has some idea of what is going on here.

@mikebarnes
It was St Paul in 1 Corinthians 13 verse 11 who put away childish things. Regrettably Cameron cannot do this and insists on presenting himself as the reasonable guy among the leftists in a 1970's student union. This is why his party finished behind the appalling BNP and Respect parties in the Rotherham by-election. Why they barely got 1,000 votes in Middlesborough and why he will be heading for an EU sinecure in 2015.

Mr Hitchens hastens to explain that he was being critical of Blair although it wasn't clear to many contributors. But we must give him the benefit of the doubt. What I don't understand though is this: If my memory serves me right, Mr Hitchens did say that he didn't consider Blair to be a war criminal (as I do).

Far be it from me to equate him with the Nazis (no sane person would do that, I hope). But I do think his aggression over Iraq makes him guilty of the same charge that was levelled again top Nazis in Nuremberg - namely, that they planned, prepared and waged a war of aggression (or words to that effect) - with catastropic consequences. Didn't Blair do just that?

@ Colm J
the trouble is Slippery is still a little boy as is Hezza and the whole shouting match . Parliamentry Question Time proved that .
I'm still getting over it. When I grew up I put away childish things. Who said that apart from I just then.

Being tough on Anthony Blair is just shutting the stable door.Many people saw through that blatherskite a dozen or so years ago.Unfortunately he was still wining elections at that time.By the time most of the population had seen through him he was long gone.You can be sure that Cameron and Osborne are already making their post 2015 plans.The real money in politics is always made after you have left office as both Blair and John Major can testify.

On reflection I don't think anyone has mentioned the fact that Blair is a devout Christian, a Roman Catholic convert. (And his buddy Bush a born-again Christian.) Both reportedly consulted God before they attacked Iraq and apparently got the green light. (Or so they claim, I believe.) - Isn't this an important aspect of their characters?

How can they reconcile their evil actions and the consequences of their aggression for the people of Iraq with their Christian consciences)? Hypocrites and war criminals the pair of them.

If a Bosnian did it he would get Jailed the winners write the history. We haven't had Democracy popular governance majority rule the whole of my adult life every govt has 70% against I don't feel British & I don't feel civilized & I want my Habeas Corpus back seeing as the whole thing was a fairytale. ProportionalRepresentation LibLab coalition I'm dreaming. HumanRight's we haven't had those very long can we keep them..? When are we going to put our foot down... on the thin ice? After you.

A line was crossed by the very suspicious death of Dr David Kelly. Our own state scared me from that point on. Nothing seemed the same in the UK after Iraq and that event. Britain stepped out to something "new" and we will never be the same again.

Norm says:"As a supplier to Sedgefield District Council in the late 70s and 80s I was told by a councillor that he was to be the next Labour Prime Minister even though no one had heard of him at that time". A very intriguing post indeed. And might it dovetail neatly with Hezza's statement that he and other grandees used to call Cameron "Mr Prime Minister", when he was a little boy?

I'm confused by what you mean when you say he didn't know what he was doing?

It seem simple enough to me:-

The Iraq invasion plan was hatched before 9/11 and the agreed public justification was WMD. The WMD story was used solely to provide some pretext for the invasion under international law as plainly Iraq was almost defenceless.

Tony knew that Bush was going to invade anyway but he genuinely believed that Saddam was evil and that Iraq would be a better place with him gone and that the gains would outweigh the losses.

Bush couldn't resist using 9/11 as an excuse once it had happened but Blair stuck to the original WMD script.

Campbell's job was to sell the WMD story to the public which led to the absurd 45 minute claim and the dodgy dossiers. He was the one following orders.

I think this is rather sympathetic to Mr Blair (not saying that as a criticism).

Personally, I suspect Blair was placed in his position by others better versed in the art of politics than he was- and I suspect his wife was probably the driving force behind most, if not all of his lunatic policies. What baffles me is how he won three elections even though he always came across as a celebrity snake oil salesman..

Been reading up on the homeless recently and discovered that many of them are from the armed forces, particularly those who've returned from Afghanistan and Iraq.

How ironic that the man who sent them there under false pretences now earns millions on the lecture circuit and is lauded as some sort of expert on peace and the Middle East...

I have often wondered who the Labour figure was who, at a lunch shortly before the 97 election, told you "You have no idea of the scale of the project on which we are embarked." Was it Campbell, by any chance?

Not sure if Blair understood what he was doing, but I don't think he cared about the consequences. For all the crocodile tears and insincere speeches about their concern for the poor and downtrodden in the world, I don't think that Blair and most of our modern political class care about the little people at all. They are only interested in rubbing shoulders with celebrities and, as Mr Hitchens says, enjoying the trappings of a rock and roll lifestyle.

Whether you agree with them or not, at least old lefties like Foot and Benn did have compassion and entered politics to do good (or what they thought was good).

Probably Blair and his advisors wanted to share in the spoils after the war. ie. Access to oil and also contracts for redevelopment of Iraq. I recall at the time the Americans said something to the effect that firms from countries that opposed the war (such as France, Germany and Russia) would not get any business contracts in Iraq afterward.

I believe Blair was also eager to suck up to Bush. PH previously mentioned that he even began to copy that cowboy walking style of Bush's. I remember also noticing that and laughing at the time.

Other than that, I agree that the man comes across as generally a bit baffled and clueless. PH sums him up well: a lightweight telegenic actor who appears harmless enough and won't scare voters.

I meant to respond to one of your posts a week or two back, but was busy elsewhere at the time.
You mentioned some fellow from America you would like to see on UK television, some hot-shot economist who is not of the Left, but carries much(?) support in the US. Is a new man on the scene, if not, why was he not up there leading the Republicans to victory? And why should we want him over here?
Also, as you clearly follow the economic side of politics, who's this fellow Unger(?), who appears to be catching the eye of certain Labour politician? I caught the last few minutes of a radio programme last week, but too late to get the drift of his economic theories.

Is it right to say that a person who does not understand what he is doing and inadvertently kills
many innocents is worse than one who sets out and succeeds in doing that very thing?
Surely the logic is faulty?

I agree with many on here about TB.The former PM knew what he was doing alright..I just want to know why this man is still roaming around the world a free man,its quite shocking that he has not faced trial over that ilegal war 10 years ago.

I would be interested to know when Mr Hitchens changed his mind about Tony Blair.

During a 1994 appearance on C-Span (available on C-Span), when his brother Christopher says that Blair has avowedly based his political style on Bill Clinton and that he will likely win the Labour leadership contest but loose the 1997 General Election for that reason, Peter defends Blair thusly:

"Tony, who I know, does not model himself on Clinton and was rather embarrassed by the comparisons made between him and Clinton. Two, he is by no means certain to win the leadership because the Labour Party actually has no members to speak of, except for a small group of people who know they are right and are quite capable of picking another loosing leader - and may well do so in the next few months."

Mr Hitchens,
An interesting article. Why no mention of the "Famous Five"? Perhaps Anthony (as my wise old history teacher once said, voters respect a bit of posh) Blair was a cunning eel who used people who thought they were using him to pursue their interests. An obscure Austrian politician in the 1930's was made Chancellor of Germany for this very reason.

Three quick points:
1. PH "when poor old Footy became an unperson, not to be mentioned in public, let alone honoured as a former leader of his party and (like him or not) a distinguished figure of the Left."

I notice Hitchens quite likes complimenting old socialists in this way - with words like 'distinguished'. (How someone who is wrong in everything he believes in can be 'distinguished' is beyond me).
Has Hitchens ever been known to use the word 'distinguished' for any members of the Conservative Party? - or how about the BNP? Can we disagree with someone in the BNP and still call them a 'distinguished figure of the right'?

How about any Libertarian or Austrian School thinkers? Has he ever described Ludwig Von Mises as 'distinguished' - or maybe Murray Rothbard?

I doubt it.

2. PH "Round about then I first met ‘the barrister, Anthony Blair’, thanks to my wife’s membership of a body called the Society of labour Lawyers."

It's interesting that Peter Hitchens wife was a socialist too. Would he mind telling us if she is still a socialist? When did she give it up if she did?

In my experience people find it very hard to get along with people / partners on a constant day to day basis if they share opposing political beliefs. There's just a constant rubbing up the wrong way going on.
Did she give it all up at the same time as PH?

3. My own view of Blair is that he knew exactly what he was doing when he took us to war. His overwhelming arrogance and vanity has always led him to think he should be President of Europe. That often happens to people who achieve office when young - they take the post they have for granted, believe they deserve it, and then want even higher offices to follow.

With Brown snapping at his heals - and having the power to force him out - which he eventually did - he wanted somewhere to leave or escape to - onwards and upwards.
However - with the UK out of the Euro currency - a situation unlikely to change - his route to the Presidency seemed blocked - so he needed something 'special' to make his name in Europe and make him look more statesmanlike than any other Euro pigmy politicians. If the Iraq war had been a success and WMD had been found - any at all - he could have told all of his euro doubters that they had been wrong and he had been right - and he was the man to lead Europe forwards.

He took that gamble (with other people's lives) because he had no other route/chance of obtaining the Euro Presidency.
You can see from the fact that he still wants it and is still manoeuvering for it, that it's the thing he coverts most.

This applies not just to war. Although most have never shared any stage with him, Blair is joined in this prolonged, but ultimately transitory era of 'baffled squeaks' and destructive foolishness by countless others.

But that stage on millennium night, with the paradoxical accompanying music perfectly epitomised, for me, not just Blair, but everything about the world as we are experiencing it at the moment.

A fascinating post. It is because you bother to take time to look in detail at actual past events, and therefore offer a perspective which ignores the conventional wisdom and cliches which often become the Accepted 'Truth' in mainstream editorial pieces, that I read this blog religiously. Keep up the good work!

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